inhuman condition – The Writers in Residence

Kate Thornton is a retired US Army officer who enjoys writing both mysteries and science fiction. With over 100 short stories in print, she teaches a short story class and is currently working on a series of romantic suspense novels. She divides her time between Southern California and Tucson, Arizona. Check out her website here.

I finished a Christmas story last week and sent if off to a magazine that has a tracking application online. Of course, I check it daily. Five days in slush and still not read – I may have to volunteer as a slush reader to get it going.

I always write seasonal stories out of season – that way there is really no looming deadline and magazines really like to get their seasonal stuff lined up ahead of time. Writing short stories is not easy – they must be tight, have impact, be satisfying and, well, short.

But the really tough writing project I am working on is a novel I wrote in 1998. Back then, I thought I was a novelist and knocked out 3 or 4 long works – adventure/mysteries – that I thought were really good. Hah! Shows what little I knew! They needed a lot of work. So I shelved them (one was actually agented and had some interest from St. Martin’s Press, only back then I didn’t know enough about revisions to do the necessary rewrites.) The event that triggered this effort was lunch a while back with an old friend, a dear friend, who asked about that particular book and remembered it fondly. Bless my beta readers!

So I am re-reading it first (I have a copy printed on my old laser printer) then doing a page-by-page rewrite into my computer. I used to have this work on an ancient five-inch floppy disc, but who knows what happened to that and what I could use to extract the info anyway. Also, I think it was in one of the very first iterations of Word Perfect. Yes, I am old!

I once heard you must write a million words before you learn how to put them into the right order. I am sure this old effort was part of my first million, and therefore should just be counted as practice, not the real deal. But I want to salvage the basic story, change the main character to one I have been developing, and update the technology (both in the storyline and what I use to write with.)

Maybe it will be a successful project. If so, I have at least three more “Trunk Novels” that could get the same treatment, if they’re worth it.

So, how about you? Do you save your old stuff and use it – or parts of it – later? I like the idea of doing this, but it sure is a lot of work. An author of my acquaintance recommends just ditching it all and writing something new. There is certainly a lot to be said for that approach. But there is also something about an old friend, a character you have created, coming home to the present and being with you again.

So, for now, I want to revisit this person and see if they can get used to the world as it is now. And I think maybe it will help me to accept the world of today as well.

THE NOVEL APPROACH

I write mostly short stories – concise, complete, beginning-middle-end pieces with one or two plot points, one or two (or at the most three) main characters and a satisfyingly twisty ending. I take a week or so to get one out, sometimes longer, sometimes much shorter. The “thought time” – the time I spend ruminating about an idea – can be much, much longer, years even. The end product is usually no more than a page or two for flashes, and not more than 6 or 7 pages for the rest.

But I have been thinking about a novel. Yes, it’s a big project. Yes, it makes putting together a precise if not precious little short story collection look easy, and yes, I must be out of my mind. The idea is there, lurking in my head like a well-behaved child, quietly playing in a corner, smiling when I look directly at it. So how does one start writing a novel? I can only tell you how did it.

I started something, a first page of a something – mystery? adventure? – with lost dogs and lost children and at least one spooky old house full of secrets and dread. I thought of a Main Character, a middle-aged woman with some problems. I like my Main Character and I decided to put her on vacation. The vacation premise is a nifty device which limits the amount of time that MC can hang around and get the meat of the story on the table. I like the setting and I myself have vacationed, so I know what it’s like to be in a strange part of the world. I like to read about lost people and lost stuff and old secrets and spooky houses, so i want to write about them, too.

But writing a novel is hard. Even the “thought time” is hard. I know I just want to tell a story, and when I tell the story in short form, I get to the point pretty quickly. But in a novel, I have all this room. It’s like being a container gardener who enjoys the little pots of color and scent but is now thrust onto an acre and told to grow food. I *did* write that first page, it *is* intriguing (well, to me, anyway) and I really do want to push forward. But the landscape is daunting.

So maybe I need to do something I have never done before: outline. Outline the big story, and then fill in the smaller stories, maybe. Make character lists in which I describe them so they don’t change hair color or family ties or gender mid-story. Sketch out locations, descriptions, where the tension is, where the body is. Okay, *who* the body is – and why they are now just worm-fodder.

But I am afraid to outline and then lose interest, because once I know the whole story, what’s the point in telling it? Is this what all novelists face? Do they plod on anyway? Is it really more work, more trouble, more tedium than it’s worth?

Maybe. Maybe I’m just really a short-story writer with a screwy idea. Maybe the novel form is more difficult than I imagined, harder than anyone who hasn’t tried it knows. For all those folks who sneer and say, “Huh, I could’ve written this!” after reading a novel, I just want to publicly say, “Oh, yeah? Well, show me!”

Because it’s hard. But it’s not impossible.

Hang in there. You can do it. I think I just did.